Fifteen things Kentuckians have to explain to visitors

So you’re visiting Kentucky for the holidays: Welcome! Bless your heart, we’re just so pleased you’ve stopped by our little state before you get back to running the United Nations Security Council, or whatever your real job is.

For some, Kentucky is a state that, while known for Daniel Boone and bourbon, isn’t all that familiar. So, here are a few things you should know about us, at least those of us in Lexington and the eastern part of the state. .

1. We obsess about the weather, because Kentucky gets all the extremes and none of the credit.

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Minnesota might be frigid and Florida hot, but it can be pipe-busting cold during harsh Kentucky winters and swampily humid in the summers. Why, just within the past two weeks we’ve had temperatures in the 70s and the 30s. We remain mystified about how to cope. Therefore, we revere our weathermen like the seers and gods they are.

2. Don’t call us “a flyover state.”

Sure, our primary is meaningless and our left-wingers would be considered Republicans in Vermont, but we love to fight among ourselves. And do the names Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul mean anything to you?

3. Stuck in a room/plane/elevator with a Kentuckian? Here’s how to survive.

The line you want is, “How about that Rick Pitino?” Every Kentuckian currently rocking a brain-wave pattern has an opinion about the mercurial, scandal-tinged University of Louisville men’s basketball coach who left the University of Kentucky and broke the collective Big Blue Nation’s heart.

Pitino is loved and hated, often by the same person within the same conversation. It’s mesmerizing.

What would you add to this list? What do you have to explain to Bluegrass visitors?

4. Backup survival tip: #BBN forever.

It’s Big Blue Nation here, folks. That means the fate of the UK men’s basketball team is always acceptable conversation. You do not have to understand the intricacies, and frankly, it’s impossible to grasp them all.

When pressed for a conversational contribution, pump your fist and say, “Go Cats!” This works both earnestly and ironically, and covers you with everyone from the artisanal beer-sucking millennials to the small-town Dairy Queen-employed saints who help you when your GPS lands you in the middle of the railroad tracks.

NCAA Bracket Sunday is like a holiday here. We all fill out brackets. (Last year, my family had a bracket pool, and two of us cannot reliably identify a basketball.)

In Kentucky during basketball season, it is acceptable for church to let out a little early so the BBN may get home to watch the game. The Lord is concise on game days.

5. Jordan Smith of Harlan County just won NBC’s The Voice, and we couldn’t be more proud. It’s about time something really, really good happened for our friends there. And, just so you know, we don’t all hum Coal Miner’s Daughter. (It is a catchy tune, though.)

6. How to dress like a Kentuckian.

Men from 18 months up should wear khakis, a button-up cotton shirt — in plaid if you’re feeling rakish — and some kind of dark shoe that takes mud well. Guys should look as if they just blew into town from their horse farms, even if they live in squalid apartments.

Women can wear anything they like, but the hair had better be properly blown out.

UK blue — let’s describe it as royal blue without a dimmer switch — is, of course, acceptable for all occasions.

7. How to sound like a Kentuckian.

A Herald-Leader reporter who went on to great things once approached a group of mountain men and referred to them as “chums.” That he is still among the living indicates the group laughed too hard to draw weapons.

And, just so you know, here are the city pronunciations we use: LOUIE-ville for the commonwealth’s biggest city, which reeks vaguely of Indiana; VUR-sales for the town to the west of Lexington that might remind you of Marie Antoinette’s pleasure dome, and PAHK-ville for the city to the east.

Soda is most often called pop. Kentuckians are fond of specifying Coke or Pepsi. Pepsi is strong with Kentuckians, and Mountain Dew is strongest of all. A Kentucky power breakfast is a pack of Little Debbie doughnuts and a Mountain Dew, which does in fact get you going.

Don’t call a water fountain a bubbler. We don’t hold with highfalutin talk like that.

8. You have to eat: Kentuckians love a fried thang or two.

We have foodies too, so don’t look down your nose at us. Just be advised that we take corn bread and biscuits very seriously. Don’t say snotty things about salty country ham: We like it, and that’s just bad manners. And please try the beer cheese. You won’t be sorry.

9. You’ll want to drink: Bourbon rules, but like every other state in the union, we have a cluster of small independent breweries concocting light lemony ales and hoppy chewy dark brewskis. Your choice. Or, you can find the two together in some locally brewed Kentucky bourbon barrel ales.

10. Well-to-do Kentuckians have houses at the lake. Rich Kentuckians have houses in Florida. Truly rich Kentuckians have jets that fly them to France for dinner.

11. Lexington is the center of Kentucky. Louisville residents who say otherwise are probably undercover Hoosiers.

And no, Lexington is not the Derby City. That’s Louisville. But Lexington’s Keeneland race course did host the Breeders’ Cup in October , so we had our fill of the jets of the rich and famous and horsey, and occasions to throw parties and consume great quantities of drink.

12. Lexington had an openly gay mayor before it was cool; indeed, he’s still in office. In Lexington it is safe, although not popular, to be an actual mainline Democrat.

13. Subjects to avoid: Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis (done to death), firearms (you won’t change anyone’s mind), obesity (we’re always close to the top of states packing the pounds).

14. Another sore point with us: We hate the CentrePointe hole in the middle of Main Street, having lived with it for years.

It’s super that it now has those lovely photo-curtains to kind of disguise it, but we still know it’s a hole. Hatred of the CentrePointe hole is something that unites Lexingtonians at all ends of the political spectrum. We eagerly await seeing something actually being built there soon. If not sooner.

15. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln are revered here. Abe Lincoln was born in nearby Hodgenville; Mary Todd Lincoln was more the Lexingtonian. You may tour her one-time house on West Main Street in downtown Lexington (but you’ll have to come back in mid-March, when it reopens for the season). By the way, when Mary Todd Lincoln House opened in 1977 it was the first house museum in America to honor a first lady.

Welcome to Kentucky! Here’s a biscuit and a tumbler of bourbon. Bless your heart.